In Astana, Madina saw how difficult it was for working parents to find reliable childcare at short notice. She responded by building an AI-powered mobile platform that matches families with verified caregivers in real time. Adoption was swift, registrations climbed, and partnerships began to take shape. The model is gaining traction. Demand is expanding.
To grow beyond early users and scale across cities, however, Madina needs capital. The technology works. The market is responding. What stands between her and the next stage is access to the networks and capital that enable high-growth startups to scale.
Many women entrepreneurs, like Madina, in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) are building high-growth, technology-driven companies with proven performance and clear market demand—yet they remain underrepresented in regional startup ecosystems and investment portfolios. Across the region, they are developing solutions to pressing economic and social challenges, often in contexts where those challenges are most acute.
Despite rising participation, women-led startups capture only a small share of venture capital in ECA. Structural frictions—including weaker access to investor networks, smaller initial funding rounds, and fewer visibility platforms — constrain their ability to scale.
Research shows that women serial founders receive smaller venture capital investments after prior failures but are not rewarded with larger deals following successes—while male founders benefit regardless of outcome (Hebert, Yimfor, and Tookes, 2025).
As a result, even the most promising ventures struggle to connect with investors, leaving untapped potential on the table. Addressing these visibility and connection gaps is not only a matter of fairness—it is an economic opportunity that can unlock growth, boost job creation, and help scale solutions across the region.
WeVenture: Strengthening the Pipeline of Investment-Ready Women Entrepreneurs
As part of its commitment to supporting private-sector-led growth in emerging markets, the World Bank Group launched WeVenture—a regional initiative designed to identify, support, and connect high-potential women-led startups with the skills, networks, and investors they need to scale and grow.
In its first regional cohort, WeVenture focuses on women-led startups in Armenia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. The program attracted significant interest, receiving applications from more than 470 women entrepreneurs across sectors such as healthcare, agribusiness, and enterprise software.
What stood out was not just the volume of interest but the sophistication of the applicants’ business models. Among the top-tier ventures—those positioned to attract investment and scale rapidly—88 percent are already deploying artificial intelligence in their operations. These women entrepreneurs are using technology to tackle urgent challenges—providing developmental screening where pediatric specialists are scarce, detecting epileptic seizures through sleep monitoring, diagnosing crop diseases via smartphones while connecting farmers to buyers, and reducing manual compliance work by up to 80 percent while halving regulatory costs.
Many of these businesses are already delivering results. Within a few years of registration, nearly half are fully operational. Sales rose by 15 percent from 2024 to 2025 for the typical firm, one in three reported profits in 2024, and nearly 30 percent are exporting. Women make up 60 percent of their workforce, showing how women’s entrepreneurship drives growth while creating jobs for other women.
Beyond firm-level performance, these ventures are creating new markets, strengthening innovation ecosystems, and expanding access to essential services. They are not waiting for ecosystems to mature—they are actively shaping them.
An Investment Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight
By overlooking high-potential women-led ventures, investors are leaving returns on the table. Increasing investment in women-led businesses may also require having more women in decision-making roles on fund teams (IFC, 2026).
WeVenture addresses this market inefficiency by connecting women-led startups with investors and reinforcing those connections through targeted skills development, curated networks, and Demo Days that bring founders directly into the room with capital providers—cutting through the barriers that keep even the most promising ventures from being seen. Evidence suggests that when such constraints are removed, startups experience a sustained upward shift in their growth trajectory (González-Uribe and Reyes, 2021).
As we mark March, the month of International Women’s Day, one thing is clear: women entrepreneurs in ECA are not waiting to be included in the future of growth—they are already driving it.
For founders like Madina, scaling often depends on support. With the right networks, her vision can reach far more parents and communities—a reminder of what becomes possible when talent meets opportunity. It is time for investors, institutions, and markets to rise to meet Madina and other women entrepreneurs like her, where they already are.
By Lucero Burga, Santiago Reyes, Daksh Baheti
